Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Saying Good-bye to Seattle

We've enjoyed spending time with our son, Blake, and his girl-friend Claire. But they had to get back to work in Oklahoma, so we had to wrap up our fun in Seattle. They went to the Seattle Underground Tour on their last morning with us. Then we wanted to visit a few other Seattle sights on their last day of touring. We drove up the steep streets to Kerry Park--famous for the best views of Seattle.

If we move the people out of the way, we can point out some of the sights that are visible from this hill-top. There's the Space Needle (that's getting a $100 million dollar face lift this year), Key Arena (where Kevin Durant played his first professional basketball), CenturyLink and Safeco Fields, etc. At first we tried to camouflage the huge crane that is obvious in the picture below. But on any given day we could see a dozen different cranes in the Seattle sky line. This is definitely a city that is building.

If we zoom in a little, we can see that on this clear day, Mount Rainier is lurking in the background. It's hard to describe how big this mountain is. We are sixty miles away, and it still dwarfs everything around it, including the other mountains in the Cascade range.

At over 14,000 feet, the other mountains around it don't even show up in the landscape. This was our best picture of Mount Rainier from this view point so far away. It always took our breath away when we caught a glimpse of it from different vantage points.

We walked to the end of the street, to see the views to our west. As we looked across Puget Sound, we could see the snowy tops of the Olympic Mountains. We had been there just a week ago, and it was good to see them again.

In the harbor in front of us was a Carnival ship, taking on another group of passengers for a week-long cruise to Alaska. Denisa got a little giddy watching this cruise ship. It must be time for another cruise for her.

We were drawn further down the street, towards a sweet familiar aroma that was filling the air. We finally found the source--a grove of locust trees in full bloom. We had one of these trees in the backyard of our first house, and we loved the smell when it bloomed in the spring.

These trees have a two-story walkway beside them. So you can literally sniff the blooms at nose level rather than from the ground far below the blooms. Our team of sniffers agreed it was a sweet perfume!

We wonder what the prices of the homes along this majestic old street must be. They seem to happily share it with tourists who come for the views. There is a corner flower garden open to the public, and we had to take a picture of the purple rhododendrons that guard its gate.

We ate some lunch at a little restaurant with outdoor seating, and discovered we were near the offices of the Amazon Corporation. We watched as people kept walking by our cafe, eating bananas. We speculated on why this was happening. Then we caught a glimpse of the rolling Community Banana Stand. These two guys were pushing this heavy cart through the streets, giving away bananas. We took several off their hands. Even though the banana stand doesn't publicize it, it is a project of Amazon. They want to be a good neighbor to the community it works in, so they give away 10,000 bananas every day in their two locations.

We celebrated our last evening at one of Seattle's city parks, looking over Puget Sound toward the sunset.

We've enjoyed spending five days with these two kids, who look especially cute with the setting sun shining on them.

We took them to the airport the next morning, and they had to go back to real life and jobs in Oklahoma. We miss our friends and family back in Oklahoma, so we enjoy these visits from home. We're glad that some of those friends and family enjoy making the trip to wander with us.